The optimism prism: Better angels of our nature

A passenger airplane with 239 people vanishes into a dark night, leaving the world mystified and horrified. A resurgent superpower swallows a territory it ceded to a neighbour, causing tension around the globe. Voters in the world’s largest democracy are so disgusted with the two political principals that they look to a year-old party with no governing experience for salvation.

Then there is the usual hunger, disease, violence, pollution, rising prices, falling water tables, expanding population, contracting urban space… the bad news never seems to end. If it appears that way, it’s only because the human mind is genetically programmed to be pessimistic.

A tonsil-like brain part called amygdala has apparently been fine-tuned for human early warning functions, so we’re hard-wired to look out for negative signals, for danger. Ergo, we embrace dark forebodings and bad tidings more readily than good news. Not even research data of the kind Steve Pinker produced in his book, The Better Angels of our Nature, which argues that violence and bloodshed is actually declining in the world, convinces us otherwise.

But peel and pare away gloom and doom, and you will see bountiful good news in every sphere of human activity.

You can hear it in conventions of doctors, physicists, conservationists, architects, astronomers, food scientists, energy mavens etc, across the world, particularly from those working in the cutting edge of their fields. Many of them congregate at the annual TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference, which has acquired a reputation as a Davos for optimists. As fast as humankind is degrading and depleting the planet, this confederacy of brainiacs throws up solutions.

Take the Malaysian Airlines incident. If it had happened just a year down the line, the plane would have never escaped detection. A company called PlanetLabs announced at TED2014 that it has just launched 28 compact, mini-satellites, with high-resolution capability – sats that weigh as little as 10 kgs and cost just hundreds of thousands to do the job of current ones that weigh tons and cost up to $800 million. More than 100 such mini-sats will be launched over the next year, making it the largest constellation of imaging satellites in human history. They will line-scan the earth, capturing the entire surface of the planet, every day, at all times. And like Google and Wikipedia, it will be open source. Others announced breathtaking advances in architecture, medicine, conservation, in almost every sphere of human endeavor that bespoke better days to come.

Such optimism may be hard to embrace in a country in throes of despair in the midst of an election. But every person I spoke to at TED was upbeat when it came to India, preferring to look at solutions rather than problems. Energy guru Amory Lovins, chuckling at being called up to speak between a cricketer and a Bollywood star during a conference in New Delhi, laughs at the idea that India will have an energy crisis. Not because India has the world’s third largest coal reserves or a nuclear-energy program; just its renewable energy investments and increased efficiencies alone are enough. He’s up to proving it building to building, starting with an Infosys campus that uses 70% less energy.

Fresh from the successful anti-polio campaign galvanized by his foundation, Bill Gates beamed as he reeled off numbers that showed a precipitous decline in the mortality rate of children below five years – down from 20 million in 1960 to six million. He’s shooting for below a million before the end of the decade. MIT’s prosthetic limb pioneer Hans Herr, when asked how people who could barely afford $50 for a Jaipur foot in India could hope for a bionic limb costing $50,000, said his team was going to India frequently to study costing and scale. But, he argues, if the productive life of a person is worth $10 million, and the limb cost $10,000, wouldn’t it be prudent economics to invest in one rather than leaving the person to an unproductive fate with attendant health care costs?

TED teems with such out-of-box thinking and unconventional views, boiling with pennies-to-the-dollar solutions for everything from basic healthcare and medical diagnostics – use-and-throw microscopes for 50 cents, $35 portable incubators that do the work of a $20,000 machine, home diagnostic dipsticks that can give basic information about blood sugar, etc – to education and environment. Some of the solutions like colonizing planets and re-engineering the body sound out of the world. But at the time they were invented, savants of the day declared that airplanes, computers, cellphones, satellites, etc would be of no use to the common man.

Watching a researcher explain the dynamics of dragonfly’s wings, a thought crosses the mind: Pigs may not fly, but humankind, with the wind of optimism beneath its wings, will. Literally and individually.